Doesn't help that even the last one looked and played like an early 360 or PS3 game, meanwhile you have NBA and FIFA looking and playing so much better and that divide only continues to grow. Most defenders of the game will jump out with the whole "FIFA and NBA have much bigger budgets" and what not, but that doesn't change the fact that they're the same price as the try to sell a League game for, and are of a much higher quality.
Mate, no offense but this is just a simple issue of economies of scale...
Madden has a market of around half a billion people that are nuts about the sport and FIFA has over a billion. Rugby League has half of Australia and a pocket in the north of England and NZ for a total potential market of around 20 million max.
You can talk about the game costing the same as madden, but then a movie ticket to a small local film will still cost the same as a big budget Marvel movie as well, so it's hardly unique.
The simple fact is that the economic of making a current gen Rugby League title barely stack up as it is, so all you're going to achieve by demanding a lower price is just bring the quality down further or completely eliminate any business case for making a rugby league game at all. In fact, the irony of your argument is that if you apply the economic theory the price should be higher precisely because it's a small market and therefore doesn't have the scale to bring down costs.
It might sound like a tired excuse to some people, but that's because it's a simple and fairly brutal economic fact. Our sport isn't even close to 1% of the size of soccer internationally and isn't much more than 1% of the size of the NFL market, so why would you ever expect a rugby league video game to be in the same league as games representing those behomeths?
The way I look at it is like buying local. Sure I pay a premium for a lot of stuff I could get cheaper at a major Supermarket, but I want to support my neighborhood and its businesses. A local sports game is very much in that category
